How do 3 channels affect a network when detecting human skin (CNN)?
3 channels will give you more information about the color of the object and surroundings which might be important in certain cases. For example if you want to classify blue cars and red cars then color of the object is very important. Since your problem is to classify hand gestures then color might not be that relevant. You're not very interested in the color of the hand you only care about it's position so there is a good chance that grayscale images might be enough. You should try with grayscale first and if that works good, if not, try with 3 channels.